TWENTY THINGS I’VE LEARNED FROM RUNNING A WEBSITE FOR EIGHT YEARS

1. The ladies go flat-out ape for Georgia; find Verdana to be “sort of gay.”
2. One time I took a pair of golf cleats to this guy’s dangling participles.
3. If I’m going to eat a cute animal, I want it to be totally ground up and unrecognizable, i.e., no eyes or paws or fluffy tails.
4. Everyone’s voice is disappointingly high.
5. Flexing my rippling chest muscles works just as well as an iron, in terms of removing wrinkles from my shirts.
6. No one’s impressed by your whistling like at all.
7. God plays Uno Deluxe with the universe.
8. God grows out his pinky nail and uses it as a coke spoon.
9. There are two types of people in this crazy old world: staplers, and staple-removers.
10. I can keep the white-hot fires of geniusness burning indefinitely.
11. I use “white-hot” a lot. Also “particular” and “sinuses” and “-infused” or “-fueled.”
12. There’s good sexual harassment and there’s bad sexual harassment.
13. When I was like 11 I got some business cards for my detective agency (“Dietrich’s Detectives: Detectives, Spies, and Odd Jobbers” — I don’t remember if I was supposed to be Dietrich or what) and I wanted to run an ad in the paper advertising my services but my mom vetoed it. The minimum number of cards I could get was 500 so they haunted me for years, always popping up, being used as scratch paper, etc.
14. O, wandering maid, sing to me of your adventures, your knife-fights, your blackest yearnings.
15. Daddy could kill a man just with algebra. His nails were cracked and yellow. A lazy eye implies that the other eye is stronger but he had two lazy eyes so maybe his condition should be called something else. He worked for a man who worked for a man. He had a thing for Lynn Redgrave. He is my hero.
16. And P.S. Alex says I’m always talking about transdermal patches and injecting things into one’s eye.
17. There was a parrot in the neighboring cubicle — an African Gray. It could simulate a truck backing up, a cellphone ringing. It would re-create one-sided phone conversations, complete with the phone-hanging-up sound effect. Lucky for it it was so good. Then one afternoon, when it was just me and Zach in The Pit (the super-sized cubicle that held five or six people), it said: “All we do is fight.” Sort of quietly. And only that one time. Zach and I looked at each other, wondering if we’d heard what we thought we heard.
18. [deleted]
19. Time rots with each passing second and so by now it’s pretty haggard, on its last legs.
20. Every day I should create a little and destroy a little.